Innehållsförteckning för 19 April 2024 från Guardian Weekly

Guardian Weekly is an edited selection of some of the best journalism found in the Guardian and Observer newspapers in the UK and the Guardian’s digital editions in the UK, US and Australia The weekly magazine has an international focus and three editions: global, Australia and North America. The Guardian was founded in 1821, and Guardian Weekly in 1919. We exist to hold power to account in the name of the public interest, to uphold liberal and progressive values, to fight for the common good, and to build hope. Our values, as laid out by editor CP Scott in 1921, are honesty, integrity, courage, fairness, and a sense of duty to the reader and the community. The Guardian is wholly owned by the Scott Trust, a body whose purpose is…

LABOUR Rayner will step down if found to have broken law Angela Rayner has pledged to step down as deputy leader of the Labour party if a police investigation finds she has committed a crime, amid allegations of breaching electoral law and avoiding capital gains tax. Greater Manchester police said last Friday it was investigating her council house sale in March 2015, after she was accused of giving false information about where she was living for the first five years of her marriage before she was elected as an MP in May 2015. She also faces calls to publish the legal and tax advice she has received to prove she does not owe capital gains tax of up to £1,500 ($1,870) on the profits of the sale of her council…

Iran’s attack on Israel tested the country’s air defences, but repaired – at least temporarily – Tel Aviv’s fractured relationship with Washington, and pushed the war and the looming famine in Gaza out of the headlines and down the diplomatic agenda. In Gaza, where almost all the civilian population is displaced and hungry after more than six months of war, this shift in attention has been felt acutely. “Countries and peoples were sympathetic to us, but now sympathy has shifted to Israel,” said Bashir Alyan, a 52-year-old former employee of the Palestinian Authority now living in a tent in Rafah with his five children. “Israel became the victim overnight.” Alyan’s family are mostly living off food aid provided by Unrwa, the UN agency for Palestinian refugees, and eat only two…

A dramatic rise in European energy prices is inevitable if the Russian destruction of Ukrainian energy infrastructure continues unabated, the former chief executive of Ukraine’s state-owned oil company has warned. Andriy Kobolyev, a former head of Naftogaz, said in an interview with the Guardian: “Russia is trying to wage a global energy war and Ukraine is part of that war, and if the markets perceive Russia is winning that war the consequences will be very serious. You will see a spike in prices all round the globe”. He said there would be no point holding any more Ukraine reconstruction conferences until Ukraine is supplied with weapons to save its energy infrastructure from the wave of attacks by Iranian-made Shahed drones and guided bombs. Last week a massive missile and drone…

‘People are jumping on planes right now and leaving,” said Nimesh Shah, the chief executive of Blick Rothenberg, an accountancy firm that specialises in advising very rich “non-doms” on their tax. Shah said his clients were “petrified” of plans to abolish the “non-domicile” regime, through which for the past 225 years wealthy people have been able to live in the UK and not pay tax on their overseas income. Non-dom status was introduced under George III in 1799 to allow subjects who lived part of the time in far-flung colonies to avoid paying tax in the UK. Labour has long promised to end it and raise billions in extra taxes. But Jeremy Hunt, the chancellor, surprised Labour by stealing the policy and announcing in the spring budget the abolition of…

There was a moment on 15 April 2019 as the flames consuming Notre Dame Cathedral roared into the evening sky when it seemed all would be lost. Miraculously, firefighters stopped the blaze reaching the bell towers – whose collapse would have almost certainly brought the facade down – and from destroying the bells, the Grand Organ and the Parisian monument’s stained-glass rosette windows. The bee hives on the roof also survived, along with dozens of treasures including precious artworks, ancient books and relics extracted by a human chain of firefighters, police and city council workers. In the weeks after, as the damage was assessed, a unique collection of 17th-century religious paintings was removed from the cathedral, damp but mostly undamaged. The 13 “Mays” – part of a series of 76…

He has been businessman, TV showman and president of the United States. This week, in the sobering surroundings of a New York courtroom, Donald Trump played yet another role in American history when he became the first former White House occupant to stand trial in a criminal case. The case, involving hush money paid to the adult film star Stormy Daniels, carries profound political and legal ramifications. It is a jury trial not only of Trump but of the US, testing its checks and balances and sacred promise that no one is above the law. Trump joins the ranks of Silvio Berlusconi of Italy, Imran Khan of Pakistan and Luiz Inácio Lula da Silva of Brazil as a world leader in the dock. For the US, this is uncharted territory:…

SURROUNDED BY SO MANY TREASURES, who would notice if a handful went missing? For many years, nobody did. A Hellenistic gem. A Roman ring. The losses have silently mounted up. To anyone behind such thefts, it must seem like an undetectable and, perhaps, even a victimless crime. After all, nobody had noticed any items were gone. Until, one day, they did. On 16 August 2023, the British Museum made an announcement. Items from the museum’s collection were “missing, stolen or damaged”, it said, adding: “A member of staff has been dismissed.” The scale of any crime was unclear, but a brief description of the missing items hinted at the significance of the discovery, referencing “gold jewellery and gems of semi-precious stones and glass dating from the 15th century BC to…

One year ago this week, Sudan descended into war. The toll so far is catastrophic. Thousands are dead, and millions are displaced, with hunger and disease ravaging all in the absence of aid. The UN has called the situation “one of the worst humanitarian disasters in recent history”, afflicting about 25 million people. The Sudanese people are suffering what has become the largest displacement crisis in the world The war was both sudden and a long time coming. The short history is that of a country where, following a promising 2019 revolution that overthrew the dictator Omar al-Bashir, the army and the Rapid Support Forces (RSF), a powerful militia, ejected civilians from a power - sharing agreement between the three parties and then could not come to an agreement themselves.…

‘I found the cheapest Strat in all the shops,” says Nile Rodgers, speaking to me from Miami Beach, the very place he went trawling for what would later be regarded as the world’s greatest electric guitar. “I traded in my Gibson Barney Kessel. The guy behind the counter gave me the Strat – and $300 back. It was the real runt of the litter.” In a nod to the model played by his hero Jimi Hendrix at Woodstock in 1969, Rodgers painted it Olympic white. He then locked himself in his bathroom for three days – “woodshedding” he calls it – until he’d mastered “chucking”, a dazzling new technique that blended off beat strumming with the muting of fretted notes. It’s a style made for the Strat’s rich percussive qualities…

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1 ISRAEL/IRAN Washington ‘will not assist’ any Israeli counterattack The Israel Defense Forces chief of staff, Lt Gen Herzi Halevi, said the country would respond to Iran’s missile and drone attack last weekend, but it was unclear what form that response would take and whether it would be so forceful that it could tip a worsening spiral of violence into a full-scale regional war. US officials said on Monday that some form of counter to Iran’s attack, which involved more than 300 missiles and drones, was almost inevitable A range of options were being discussed by Israel’s war cabinet, Israel’s Channel N12 News reported, which would show Iran its actions had crossed a red line. N12 reported that Israel intended to coordinate with the US on its response, but the…

The missiles and drones that rained destruction on Israel last Sunday morning gave Israel’s prime minister, Benjamin Netanyahu, what he craved – a mandate and justification for openly attacking Iran, a country he has long viewed as Israel’s archenemy. The pressing question is what form Israel’s promised “significant response” will take – and if Iran will strike back again. The responses of the US, Britain and other allies of Israel will be crucial. It is incumbent on them to inform Netanyahu that military, diplomatic and political support is conditional on a legitimate and proportionate riposte. It would be preferable if Israel did not hit back. Iran failed in its apparent aim of inflicting serious harm. Israel says 99% of its missiles and drones were destroyed. Casualties have been light. Tehran…

When her Boko Haram captors told Margret Yama she would be going home, she thought it was a trick. She and the other girls kidnapped from their school in Chibok, in north-east Nigeria’s Borno state, had been held for three years and had been taunted before about the possibility of release. But then came the day in May 2017 when the girls were escorted to a Red Cross convoy on the edges of the Sambisa Forest. They were driven to Banki, a town on the border between Nigeria and Cameroon, where a military helicopter picked them up. Yama was one of 82 girls recovered that month after negotiations between the militants and Nigerian authorities. The government had been under intense pressure to secure the release of all 276 Chibok girls,…

Pedalling down a narrow alleyway in Karachi’s crowded Lyari Town, Saira Bano slows as she passes a group of children sitting on the ground, listening to a man reading aloud from a book. The eight-year-old gets off her bike, slips off her sandals, and sits on the mat at the back. She has already heard the story from Mohammad Noman, who is entertaining more than a dozen children with the tale of Noori, an insecure yellow parrot. “I don’t mind listening to it again,” says Saira. “He’s so funny.” Noman, 23, is spending two weeks in Lyari pedalling an old ice-cream cart through its lanes, stopping to read his stories and leaving behind books for the children to borrow. He dropped out of school himself as a teenager but has…

When the US supreme court overturned Roe v Wade in 2022, Republicans across the country cheered. Freed from Roe’s regulations, GOP lawmakers promptly blanketed the south and midwest in near-total abortion bans. But, after a string of electoral losses, stories of women being denied abortions and polls confirming abortion bans remain wildly unpopular, the political calculus has changed. Republicans are trying to slow the car whose brakes they cut – and convince voters that, if the car crashes, they had nothing to do with it. Nowhere encapsulates the GOP’s backpedal on abortion better than Arizona, whose state supreme court last week ruled to let an 1864 near-total abortion ban go into effect. That ban, which outlaws abortion in all cases except to save the life of a woman, was passed…

We draw our moral lines in arbitrary places. We might believe we’re guided only by universal values and facts, but often we’re swayed by themes we might be unaware of. We tend to associate the imagery of our earliest childhood with what is good and right. When we see something that chimes with them, we are powerfully drawn to it and attach moral value to it. This results from a combination of two factors: finding safety and comfort in the familiar, and what psychologists call “the primacy effect” – the first thing we hear about a topic is the one we tend to recall and accept. These tendencies contribute to the illusory truth effect: what is familiar is judged to be true. We go to war for such illusory truths,…

He’s back. But he never went away. Patricia Highsmith’s diabolically inspired postwar creation Tom Ripley has returned, to luxuriate in our 21st-century age of Instagram lifestyle envy, tacit class paranoia and online identity fraud. He has triumphantly resurfaced in Steven Zaillian’s sumptuous and instantly addictive eight-episode adaptation of Highsmith’s novel The Talented Mr Ripley for Netflix, starring the incomparable Andrew Scott as the charmer, aesthete and serial killer. It’s a seven-star luxury hotel of a TV show in arthouse black-and-white It’s set in the early 60s, but has a queasy resonance for 2024. At an unhurried tempo, Scott’s Ripley is shown surmounting his early unease and likable callow vulnerability, attaining a hypnotic and insidious poise, his irises seeming to merge blackly with his pupils. Ripley is seen at first in…

Percival Everett’s new novel lures the reader in with the brilliant simplicity of its central conceit. James is the retelling of Mark Twain’s 1884 classic, Adventures of Huckleberry Finn, from the point of view of Jim, the runaway slave who joins Huck on his journey down the Mississippi River. While it would be possible to enjoy James without knowing the original, its power derives from its engagement with Twain’s book. For British readers, it also helps to know something about the centrality of Huckleberry Finn in American literature – and African American discomfort with that centrality. As an American growing up in the UK, I had an early taste of the first. It was a proud day in 1983 when we got our author copies of the new Puffin edition…

What’s the best way to cook orzo? “Orzo reminds me of being a child,” says Jacob Kenedy, chef/owner of Bocca di Lupo in London. “It’s very comforting, and you can eat it with a spoon.” In Italy the word orzo means “‘barley”, and the pasta we know as orzo more often goes by the name rosmarino or risoni (big rice). Here, we’re talking the pasta, which Kenedy uses as a substitute for both barley and rice, and says is particularly suited to soups and broths. For broths, Feast’s Italian correspondent Rachel Roddy would look to Naples and a “tasty, brothy soup with tomatoes and basil”. Sizzle some garlic in olive oil, add tomatoes (“crush them with your hands”), basil and salt. Pour in water, add orzo and simmer until the…

Last weekend’s largescale attack by Iran on Israel may have passed with relatively little damage, but it mark ed a significant transformation in the conflict between the two enemies. A war that has long been fought through proxies, assassinations and strikes away from Israeli soil has spilled into the open. While senior Israeli officials have framed the attack as “revealing the true face” of Tehran, the reality is that the proximate cause was Israel’s misjudgment in its strike on an Iranian diplomatic compound in Syria that killed two senior Iranian generals, among others. After years in which both sides operated within the framework of a largely undeclared set of “rules”, Israel – as analysts have pointed out – bulldozed through every red line to attack a location that Tehran maintains…

For centuries it has been known as the “land of the gods”. Stretching high up into the Himalayas, the Indian state of Uttarakhand is home to tens of thousands of Hindu temples and some of the holiest Hindu pilgrimage sites. Yet as Hindu nationalism has become the dominant political force in India under prime minister Narendra Modi over the past decade, the government is accused of weaponising Uttarakhand’s sacred status for politics, making the state a “laboratory” for some of the most extreme right-wing policies and rhetoric targeting the Muslim minority. India’s mammoth election starts on 19 April, stretching across a six-week period, and Modi and his Bharatiya Janata party (BJP) are expected to return to power. Over the past decade, as India has grown to become the world’s fifth-largest…

Critical thinking and open debate are pillars of scientific and medical research. Yet experienced professionals are increasingly scared to openly discuss their views on the treatment of children questioning their gender identity. This was the conclusion drawn by Hilary Cass last week in her landmark review of the services provided by the NHS in this field, which said a toxic debate had resulted in a culture of fear. Her conclusion was echoed by doctors, academic researchers and scientists, who told the Guardian this has had a chilling effect on research in an area in desperate need of better evidence. Some said they had been deterred from pursuing what they believed to be crucial studies, saying merely entering the arena would put their reputation at risk. Others spoke of abuse on…

Thirty years ago, a humble silver bus was transformed into a cinematic icon when the low-budget Australian film The Adventures of Priscilla, Queen of the Desert became a heartwarming, Oscar-winning smash hit. But for years, no one has known where the bus used in Stephan Elliott’s film went. Not long after the 38-day shoot finished in 1993, it seemingly vanished without a trace. This did not stop countless Australians from claiming they either owned it or knew who owned it, or that they had spotted it somewhere up and down the country. The story of where she ended up, and how she was found, is worthy of a film in itself. In the 1994 film, Priscilla is home to drag queens Mitzi Del Bra (Hugo Weaving), Felicia Jollygoodfellow (Guy Pearce)…

WHEN THE WATERS ROSE, Meike and Dörte Näkel weren’t worried. People in this part of the world, the Ahr valley in Germany, are used to it. The river flooded in 2016, bursting its banks and rising almost 4 metres, and before that in 2013, 1910 and 1804. Many lives were lost in 1804 and 1910, in catastrophes remembered only in stories read from history books to bored schoolchildren. The sisters’ great-grandmother Anna Meyer lived through the 1910 flood, although she never spoke of it to Meike and Dörte. They are the fifth generation of their family to make wine in the village of Dernau. Meike, 44, is blond, thoughtful and a little serious; Dörte, 42, who has dark hair that comes down to her waist, is quicker to laugh. Both…

The French parliament is taking aim at noise complaints in the countryside. Lawmakers say they are well acquainted with the problem of residents who have moved to the countryside from the big cities bemoaning the way livestock, church bells and other rural sounds impinge on their newly claimed right to pastoral quiet. A new law aims to stop these néoruraux (rural newcomers) from taking farmers to court over farming activities that were already happening long before they arrived. Opposition MPs have derided the new bill as hot air, because it mostly just reorganises existing bits of legislation. But what is new is an emphasis on what the justice minister, Éric Dupond-Moretti, calls le vivreensemble: living together in a respectful way – something I feel is sorely needed. For the better…

Radical changes of direction seem to require a great deal of drama, at least in the recounting: a decisive moment, a flight from unhappiness, a marshalling of immense internal reserves. In truth, they are often more gently under determined than that, as is Susan Smillie’s absorbing account of her life at sea in her boat Isean. There were catalysts – the mutation of a long-term romantic relationship into a deep friendship, the sense of fracturing and fractiousness that beset the UK after the referendum in 2016 – but there was also a more gradual realignment of priorities, a slow realisation that there may be a different and more generative way to live. Maybe it started when Smillie rescued Isean from a boatyard in the west of Scotland, the vessel’s graceful…